A Tide of Swallows

I watch the green shoots burst forth and the weather fluctuate between the spring that is only at half-bloom and the approaching summer and I feel in my bones that all seasons are transitionary. I left the house on a hunt for bread-making ingredients and fell short of my goal, still yearning for a simpler and cheaper life.

The small purple and pink flowers have emerged in what passes for our front garden, long green blades unfolding from their center like the top of a pineapple and brilliant yellow-lined leaves bustling and swaying and catching the sun in a nearly-blinding display; everywhere everything is green with only a handful of lazy trees and free-spirited shrubs holding back their spring colors. A week later, after the fact, I realized that all this excited me so much that I failed to record a second sentence explaining what I was doing.

During a brief preview of summer, serenaded by the duo-tone whistle of red-winged blackbirds, the earth radiated heat and the sun shone on the brilliant greens around the lake while I paused awestruck in my walk to watch swallows pick at the fresh mud, their sleek, purple-sheened bodies in a rare stationary pursuit. After two weeks, my cold seems to be nearly gone and my reintegration back into routine nearly complete.

At the peak of the temperature climb, the thunderstorms came with a bright clatter and a solid deluge, producing an evening of blue-shaded clouds and the scent of fertile, wet soil. I sat outside today, giving myself a few moments of centering during my brain torrent, and watched a finch feeding her young during a break in the weather.

The grey fell through the day and into the evening and yet felt so much like early summer for reasons I struggled to identify, something minuscule and subtle in the earth or air. I worked again too much and too long, but balanced that out with some fantastic television with my wife.

We took a walk in the glorious sunshine today, through the thick-bladed grasses in their brilliant green, under the late-spring boughs whose new weight bends the aging branches with youthful fertility, pausing to admire the hawthorn’s delicate pink blossoms barely emerging in a first bloom. We began to plan for the next phase of our lives, a mix of hope and visioning and honest and imagined hesitations, determination and fear swirled together.

And now, even on days when it is still too cold to open the window, I sit in my chair and close my eyes as the sunlight warms my face and the finches, the chickadees and the song sparrows weave a symphony that pierces glass and fills my head with music. It was a day of planning and a day of playing, but a day where there still didn’t seem to be enough of either.

I stood outside in the warm night air and looked at the sodalite sky, the moon beginning to swell with fullness and Venus a beacon on the horizon. I am beginning a new routine today that I hope will lead me to more balance between not only work and play, but between the two worlds that I inhabit.

Fed by the record-breaking rainy spring, the grasses are now taking over the world below the knee – big bushy forests of green creep up tree trunks and hide the goings-on of the tiny creatures in their shadowed places. We went to see Aimee Mann, Jonathan Coulton and John Roderick on a night that felt like it was ten years ago.

There’s nothing that brings back childhood summers, those long nights of endless play outdoors, than the chittering calls of robins at dusk when the air turns cooler as the sunlight fades. I’m struggling to get back into the routine I need, but time is sometimes so tight that a minor shift can avalanche for days.

Huddling in the sudden rain, a puffed-up song sparrow sank down into his feet and gripped the wire; above him hungry baby starlings in a gutter nest called out to celebrate the return of their mother. I worked hard today, thought hard today, and was happy to see my bed at the end of it.

The quaking aspen, the one we call the yellow tree, is now at full leaf and shimmers each time the wind blows, reflecting both the sunlight of the day and the streetlight’s near-summer glow. We watched some surprisingly mythic and dharmic television tonight and connected with each other at the end of a long week; I feel something stirring as a result.

As the spring reaches its zenith, you can feel the summer stirring underneath – the sun growing stronger and more daring in its adolescence, the trees hush-swaying in the breeze, the earth opening its flower to potentials. We worked on the basement today, reorganizing for whatever comes next, while having a surprising and profoundly transformative discussion about personal myth.  

As one of my two semi-annual power cycles arrives, I yearn to be outside every minute as again everything is new and interesting and I’m in love with the minutiae and the overarching majesty of nature as it plays out before all my senses. It’s time for some changes and I hope that the bad brain days allow them to happen.

As the season slowly turns into early summer, I enacted a long-desired intention and began to take forced breaks from work every hour so that I could walk outside to remind myself what the real world, the world of my heart and spirit holds and wants to share with me. I ate my first batch of homemade bread and enjoyed more of a balanced day than I’ve had in months.

The straggling spring’s rogue clouds engulfed most of the day but gave way late to sunshine that is struggling to claim its rightful domain.  I again have too much to do to actually do all the things I have to do, but took time to throw I Ching coins and consult oracle decks, with truthful and largely positive results.

As the night approached, robins, perhaps a nesting pair, called out in such luscious thrush vocalizations, that I was forced to stop whatever I was doing and listen with my eyes closed, bringing every summer of my past together with that proud and territorial, red-breasted song. I stayed up way too late tonight, avoiding the responsibilities of adulthood by indulging in the directionless wanderings of childhood.

It’s the time of year in Seattle where the sunsets are indescribable in the way they paint the clouds with orange-infused mottled blues in gradient layers of gold and grey, in the way those radiant colors are reflected on the surface of cold, still lakes, and in the way those hues herald hot nights and coming adventure. I had a deep nerd conversation with a good friend tonight that made me completely forget any intrusive thoughts that may have gathered around me this morning.

My ideal summer moments all involve long, soft grass and the wind passing through trees that are abundant and full – the gentle sighing whisper sets the leaves dancing in the green shimmer of life. When the little blinking lights that connect me to my day job go dark, it’s a bit disorienting; today I spent a great deal of time just sitting and looking out the window wondering about my past and my future.

Today the summer took control, the sun dappled on the hillside as the starlings gathered in a circle to pluck at twigs; the shadows were short and the daylight spread itself well into the night. We attended a joint birthday party for two of our child friends, hung out in the park after, and ate an amazing meal in Bremerton near both the verdant slopes of Puget Bay channels and the gunmetal gray battleships of the naval base.